Social media sites are at risk of allowing terrorist content to flourish on their platforms after job cuts in the industry, undermining years of work on counter-terrorism, the UN-backed organization has warned.
Some terrorist actors have stepped up their operations on Twitter after the staff tasked with monitoring this content was fired, according to a report by Tech Against Terrorism, an initiative that helps companies police online content.
The warning comes just two months after Twitter cut its 7,500 workforce by almost half following a $44bn takeover of Elon Musk’s social network. Significant cuts are being made to Twitter’s trust and security team, which aims to protect users from illegal and harmful content, as part of the restructuring.
“If we find harmful content, we’re not sure who to contact again because we’ve been fired,” said Adam Hadley, director of Tech Against Terrorism, which published its annual review of terrorism and violent extremist activity online late Thursday.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Tech Against Terrorism is a public-private partnership launched in 2017. Its partners include Meta, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, as well as the governments of the UK, Spain and Switzerland.
The agency works with hundreds of smaller platforms, including Pinterest and Etsy, and in the past year has examined more than 19,000 websites or posts containing terrorist content from more than 70 technology companies.
Hadley also expressed concern that job cuts in the wider tech sector could affect the moderation of terrorist content because few people have the relevant experience or knowledge to monitor such content.
Both Snapchat and Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, have cut staff in recent months following revenue growth and reduced advertising spending, their main source of revenue.
“Platforms constantly have to change filters and search terms, and terrorists are always looking for ways around these rules. Our concern is that this requires deep expertise, and many experts are used to working on large platforms,” added Hadley.
Meta said safety and security remains a top priority, and has more than 40,000 people dedicated to this work. Snap, which owns Snapchat, said its trust and security team was one of the least affected by the restructuring, and none of them were considered specialists in this area.
The report also highlights the rise of small websites created by online actors to host and share terrorist content. Available sites are often left online for long periods of time as actors “exploit the lack of global consensus” on takedowns, as well as differing legal jurisdictions and under-resourced law enforcement.
“Almost nothing happens about this big terrorist operated website [and] because many of these sites remain online and easy to find, it’s difficult to discuss publicly,” Hadley said.
The organization is working on a free tool with Google’s research and development arm, Jigsaw, to help with the moderation process for smaller website owners. In December, Meta released open-source software that other platforms can use to match terrorist content with images or videos in its database and highlight it for critical human review.
The Tech Against Terrorism report also cited the increasing prevalence of IS and al-Qaeda content on major tech platforms in languages other than English and Arabic, which it said the company lacked moderation capabilities. Bad actors are also using market functions on social media platforms to sell terrorist materials, he added.